Posts by mewol

30 seconds missing

Note the timestamps in the lower right.

It turns 12:11 at about :51 seconds in. The "glitch" occurs and video comes back up at 12:12 (at 1:21 in). 12:13 arrives at 2:21, suggesting that the video resumed at exactly 12:12. So that brief blackout actually lasted ~30 seconds.

Could just be a case of editing out a 30-second camera failure, but that sure doesn't do a lot to help its credibility.

how painful

The article was bad, but the comments go beyond that into the ridiculously painful.

Mr. Goddard, I (like yourself) am not a climate scientist. But it's not that hard to find explanations for these corrections.

For instance, see http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=312 and its references at the bottom.

As I understand it, the corrections made were due to a drift in the orbits of the satellites, resulting in a mistiming of the readings. Obviously if you're erroneously attributing early-evening readings to mid-afternoon (or something similar) you're going to need to correct upwards when you discover the problem.

@Sam Lidcott

"Which was my point; except that at least the pro-ghosts think they have some kind of evidence, but the champions of rationality try and prove a negative by disproving the evidence, which hardly helps the cause of rationality."

Yikes.

Saying there are more likely to be rational explanations is FAR from trying to prove a negative. There's no need to disprove their story, because it's nonsense. But since many of us are not big fans of nonsense, people offer alternative explanations that are based in reality and not some fairy tale. If it turns out the fairy tale is true, then great, but it's up to them to prove it.

Or we could change to your mindset in which apparently every conceivable explanation is equally valid and we all ignore the accumulation of human knowledge over the past several millenia.

Since that seems fun, I propose that it was invisible leprechaun astronauts. They're well-known for their foul breath and love of phone phreaking.

@vincent

heh

Wait a second, the hearing was yesterday? The day when every lawmaker and reporter in the state was focused on the hearings about potentially legalizing gambling and introducing casinos to Massachusetts?

Wow, hard to be more buried in the news cycle than that.

Truth be told, nobody but Menino, a few dumbass state reps, and the ever-shrinking right-wing hack Boston Herald newspaper give two shits about this issue.

Not even a scientific conference.

The Heartland Institute paid $1000 to anyone willing to give a speech, as well as paying for their hotel, expenses, and travel costs. Hmm, I don't hear of that happening at a lot of scientific conferences.

Furthermore, the document the NIPCC produced is "the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists." (As compared to the IPCC's hundreds and hundreds).

According to the New York Times, "when an organizer made an announcement asking all of the scientists in the large hall to move to the front for a group picture, 19 men did so."

C'mon guys, it was just a stupid PR stunt by those whose political interests are served by denying climate change. It's hardly even deserving of argument.

This reminds me of when you'd get 100,000 people protesting against the war, and the media would give equal time to the 300 crackpots across the street protesting in favor of the war.

No one?

"No one has suggested that Comcast's management of BitTorrent caused any harm: as a Comcast subscriber and BitTorrent user, the practice kept the application running well, without degrading the rest of the neighborhood."

Okay, as a Comcast subscriber and BitTorrent user, I hereby suggest that Comcast's management of BitTorrent causes harm.

If you're unable to seed, it harms the operation of the program (it may keep "running well" for downloads, but if your goal is to distribute something that's little comfort). If every ISP followed Comcast's lead it would kill BitTorrent totally. That sure seems like harm to me.